Healing Without Side Effects: Drugs vs. Herbal Formulas by Brian B. Carter, MS, LAc

"How can you say that an herbal formula will alleviate multiple symptoms, and yet have little or no side effects? How can there be a good effect without bad effects?"

- Dr. W.H., MD, Great Falls, MT

I understand your question, Dr. H., and the reason for it. Most doctors expect herbs to act just like pharmaceuticals. If there is a beneficial healing effect, they reason, there must also be side-effects. Conversely, if there are no side-effects, then there can be no healing effect. This expectation makes sense in pharmaceutical medicine where you treat with just one active ingredient (why?) at a time. But, chinese herbal formulas make use of more than one herb 99.99% of the time. Oriental medicine has been prescribing multiple-agent compounds for thousands of years. This practice is similar to the recent drug 'cocktails' developed for HIV and HCV.

Each herb in and of itself is composed of more than one ingredient, plus other 'buffers.' I suppose you could think of a pharmaceutical as a lone-gunman; he is effective in what he does, but abrasive and dangerous. An herb, on the other hand, is a more balanced and complex person. The herbs in a formula work together as a team. Each herb has strengths and weaknesses, but the whole team can do amazing things! (I could say something really tacky now like, "There's no I in TEAM, but there is an I in SIDE EFFECTS and PHARMACEUTICALS," but I won't subject you to that kind of writing. Not directly, at least.)

Problems with Drug Treatment

To see the difference between biomedical and chinese herbal prescription, let's look at an example: You go to see your MD or DO for sinus problems and they prescribe you guaifenesin. You come back a year later with anxiety, and they prescribe you Paxil (you know it's working if you're not anxious about its side effects…). Then, you develop serious heart palpitations, but they tell you it's just in your head. After demanding more tests, you get back a normal EKG or cardiac stress test. Then they really think it's in your head. I know, this is oversimplified, but bear with me - I do have a point; the end result is that you end up on several drugs, some of which try to fix the side-effects of your primary prescription.

Often Biomedicine Knows But Cannot Do

You didn't know that biomedicine is incomplete? Consider how many diseases in biomedicine have names but not treatments. In oriental medicine, we can see your constitutional tendencies ahead of time and balance the herbal formula so that it doesn't worsen any pre-existing conditions. We can see more subtle imbalances than biomedicine can or will detect with its tests (there may be appropriate lab tests or visual studies, but if the disease has not progressed very far just try to get the insurance company to approve them!). We have ways of seeing the gray areas of imbalance that precede serious disease. To be fair, in the long run, the micro-approach of biomedicine will sharpen oriental medicine, and the broad effectiveness and insights of oriental medicine will guide and inform biomedical discovery.

Oriental Medicine is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Medicine.

It's not a one-herbal-formula-fits-all medicine. It's not a one-acupuncture-point-fits-all medicine. Oriental Medicine is a get-to-know-you medicine.

In oriental medicine, we can predict and prevent side-effects because

* We understand of the causes and nature of diseases, and

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BIO:

Acupuncturist, herbalist, and medical professor Brian B. Carter founded the alternative health megasite The Pulse of Oriental Medicine (http://www.PulseMed.org/). He is the author of the book "Powerful Body, Peaceful Mind: How to Heal Yourself with Foods, Herbs, and Acupressure" (November, 2004). Brian speaks on radio across the country, and has been quoted and interviewed by Real Simple, Glamour, and ESPN magazines.

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